Strata Clean Energy and Arizona Public Service (APS) have entered a 20-year tolling agreement for Strata’s 100 MW White Tank Energy Storage Project, following similar tolling agreements for other projects in the past few months.

Tiago Sabino Dias, Chief Development Officer (CDO) at Strata, told NPM that the White Tank Storage Project has been in the works for about five years, having entered it into the APS queue in 2020.

The Maricopa County, Arizona project was selected out of an APS RFP and is now under development with a projected COD of 1Q27.

“Next year, we are going to the market for the finance aspect,” Dias said, adding that this would be for structure debt and tax equity.

As for the tolling agreement itself, Dais explained that Strata, as the owner of the project, will provide guaranteed capacity and reliability to APS and APS then will charge and dispatch the energy to meet grid needs.

“APS has the power to match the load they are seeing on the grid with the generation of the battery,” Dias said, explaining that Arizona is experiencing a lot of load growth over the past few years that is anticipated to continue.

This growth is being driven by population, manufacturing, and data centers. Additionally, the region is seeing summers with longer heat waves, making batteries well-positioned to help support the grid.

“Batteries can be developed in load pockets for capacity fairly quickly compared to other technologies that provide capacity, like gas or coal or nuclear,” Dias said.

The White Tank project has a signed LGIA, putting the project far down the APS interconnection queue.

When asked about the APS queue, Dias said that the industry as a whole is seeing changes in queues due to FERC regulations and utilities working to translate those guidelines to meet local needs.

“That will create changes for everyone in the market,” he said. “I think APS has been dealing with that like everyone else and developers are working to navigate it like the whole industry.”

Strata has other projects earlier in the APS queue for both solar and storage. Dias said that as a Phoenix-based developer, Strata’s Arizona pipeline is large.

Currently, Strata has three tolling agreements with APS. One is for White Tank, while another 20-year agreement came from the same RFP for the 150 MW Justice Project. That project has a COD of 1Q26.

Strata also has a 20-year tolling agreement with APS for its Scatter Wash Project with a COD of 1Q25.

According to a September press release, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners acquired the 255 MW Scatter Wash standalone storage project from Strata. In February, Strata also secured USD 599m financing for the project.

 *This story was originally published exclusively for NPM subscribers.

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